Page 16 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • February 18, 2009 where you were at the time. I knew some decent Americans – servicemen, as I once was myself, though not in that particular war -- who defended the A-bomb attacks because they were poised to invade Japan and believed the bombs had saved their lives. Being a soldier in a real army is not about saving your own life. The Germans and the Japanese understood this far better than we did, which is why they were such redoubtable adversaries. Few U.S. combat pilots, combat Marines, Army paratroopers, or Rangers spent a lot of time planning their retirements either. The Germans thought these elite American troopers were excellent, and some Germans even found them terrifying. The U.S. draftees siphoned up by Selective Service received no such accolades from enemy intelligence. During the Battle of the Bulge, a whole U.S. division with plenty of ammunition and food and few casualties gave up en masse. I also know of a few knuckle-heads who claim the Jews had to die to save Europe from communism. Wrong. A small, vocal faction of Jews, most of them not German citizens, people like Leon Trotsky (Lev Bronstein) Rosa Luxemburg or Bela Kun (Cohen) were involved in Bolshevik revolutions in Russia, Hungary, and Germany, some of which featured shooting of hostages. Most Germanborn Jews were not Bolsheviks. Many German Jews were staunch Imperial patriots. Some, like Anne Frank’s father Otto, had excellent military records. Most Bolsheviks were not Jews. Attempting to wipe out an entire race for the crimes of a small faction of its members as individuals was obscene, as the Germans have long since admitted. Wartime pressure, food shortages, air raids, or whatever, it was an act of moral idiocy inﬂicted upon a minority group. I recently received a letter forwarded to me in which a professional U.S. soldier was objecting, I think, to the exhibit some years ago in which the Smithsonian was accused of revisionism for questioning whether the Abombings were really necessary and whether they might not have had racial implications. As a corollary, this is a skin litmus test: 90 percent of whites see no racism, and 90 percent of all people of color see the A-bombings as substantially racist. “I visited both Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a member of our occupation forces, I felt no regret then or now….Retribution (for Pearl Harbor) was the destruction of most of the major cities of Japan that ended with the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” The person who wrote that was retired as a sergeant major, so I will not ask about the IQ test for ofﬁcer’s school, but since “Infamy” by John Toland in 1985, everybody who can read must know that the many warnings about a Pearl Harbor attack were studiously ignored. Since “The Venona Secrets” by Herbert Romerstein in 2000, everybody who can read must know that communists in the Roosevelt administration conspired to involve the United States in a war with Japan so they could smash Hitler and save Stalin. (FDR was more interested in saving Britain, which is more commendable, but he too clearly knew an attack was about to happen. He did not even bother to warn the Paciﬁc Fleet so they could get the ﬁghter planes into the air and load the anti-aircraft guns – which could have minimized U.S. losses and maximized Japanese losses, but might also have caused the Japanese to scrub the attack that the White House regarded as a political necessity to Churchill or Stalin. Every American who died at Pearl Harbor was killed by a Japanese bomb or bullet or torpedo and by a cluster of American politicians more interested in Britain or Russia than they were in protecting American lives. They were even less interested in sheltering Jewish and other refugees from Nazi Germany or Vichy France. Just before the war, a shipload of Jewish fugitives from injustice was allowed to sit in New York Harbor with no permission to land and ﬁnally driven off to face the storm back in Europe, where about half of the passengers were later murdered. American statesmen did nothing about the Holocaust while it was going on. An offer to trade Jewish lives for U.S. trucks was rejected because Comrade Stalin might have been offended. The railroad tracks taking victims to Auschwitz were never bombed because Comrade Stalin might have been offended. The handful of politicians who dared to mention the Holocaust while it was going on (Hamilton Fish from New York, Guy Gillette from Iowa, Ed Johnson from Colorado) were marginalized because FDR did not like them. At the end of the war, however, when American troops discovered the bodies, the Holocaust was brieﬂy publicized -- perhaps as a counter-balance to the mad bombing of German and Japanese cities -- and then dropped down the memory hole as Truman and Eisenhower decided to revive Germany as a bulwark against Soviet communism. Watch the Hollywood version: In the 1940s, with Hitler the enemy, the Germans are moral lepers; in the 1950s, Stalin is the enemy and the war pictures show the Germans as heroic and likable, with one bad Nazi thrown in to appease the veterans’ groups. The culmination came in “The Young Lions.” Marlon Brando plays the focal Nazi as an idealistic Mr. Nice Guy with a strong streak of decency, horriﬁed to suicidal depression when he blunders into a death camp. Montgomery Clift plays a sensitive Jewish American constantly beaten up by thuggish American G.I.s in his own outﬁt until he learns to ﬁght back. Dean Martin plays the gentile American as a boozy, lecherous scoundrel. An apple and an orange are not the same, but they are both fruits. The Holocaust happened and it was mass murder at its most despicable. The air raids on German and Japanese women and children really happened, and they were more of the same. Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany. A-bomb applause should not be criminalized in America because we need to preserve the right to free speech, but nobody should take the applause seriously. Kids are always kids and murder is always murder.
The Pope is taking ﬂak for having rehabilitated a bishop who reportedly denied the Holocaust took place. A number of people, including the chancellor of Germany – a country where Holocaust denial is a crime subject to a ﬁne and a jail term on conviction – wrote to object to this. So did a number of Jewish groups. What the bishop appears to have said is that the Jewish dead numbered in the hundreds of thousands and that there were no gas chambers. He is wrong twice: No responsible historian now denies that gas chambers existed, and while the dead may have numbered closer to ﬁve million than six million, there were murders by the million and not by the thousands, or hundreds of thousands. Holocaust denial is mean-spirited junk history, and people who check the facts know this. There are too many photographs and too many survivors. I am thinking here of Joseph Horn from Glen Rock who survived an incredible seven years as a Jewish slave laborer in the Third Reich, brought some of his persecutors up on charges, and helped the West German prosecutor land them stiff prison terms for wanton murder. Horn was initially doubted because, as the West German authorities told him, nobody could have survived seven years as a slave in Nazi Germany even if he had worked hard enough to be spared the gas chambers at Auschwitz. They checked his story, and found he was telling the truth. There were no “legal lynchings” in Horn’s case, as there were when several European immigrants to America were framed as Nazi murderers in the 1980s. The murderers Horn accused were real murderers. Horn’s book, “Mark It with a Stone,” is far better than the ones they make the kids read in school because it is utterly factual. When you read it, you know he saw what he said he did. Last, but not least, for the implausibility of Holocaust denial, there are too many confessions, including some in the shadow of the gallows from people who converted to Catholicism, like Governor General of Poland Hans Frank, who knew he was about to die anyway. Even Adolf Eichmann, who rejected the Bible but talked about the Next World, did not deny the gas chambers existed. He denied that they were part of his job. He knew perfectly well the people he transported were about to be triaged and that the weak among them would be murdered. He was “only following orders.” A lot of people use that excuse for the rampant killing of civilians. Unfortunately for Mom, apple pie, and the Star-Spangled Banner, not all of them are Germans or German-Austrians. As a U.S. corollary to a European horror, we have a ﬂip side – well-meaning people who shrug off or applaud the atomic bombings and ﬁre raids on Japan and the ﬁre raids on German civilians – when the issue of World War II was no longer in doubt. Furl the ﬂag and follow the logic: Is a child gassed and then burned behind barbed wire by Nazi murderers any more dead than a child burned or suffocated by British or U.S. incendiary bombs even when the pilots cannot see the victims? Was the Holocaust justiﬁed? Of course it wasn’t. It was a crassly criminal act inﬂicted on predominantly innocent people. Were the bombings justiﬁed? That depends on
Revisionism rebuked
Letters to the Editor
Dear Editor: President Barack Obama is no friend of the most vulnerable. It took him only three days in ofﬁce (Jan. 23) to strike down the Bush administration’s ban on giving federal money to international groups that perform abortions or provide abortion information. Obama’s executive order was cowardly signed without coverage by the media to avoid objections by pro-life groups. Since when has it become the responsibility of U.S. taxpayers to fund/promote the deaths of the innocent anywhere in the world? I think he was wrong in signing that order. Unfortunately, we will have to wait for a new president to reverse this executive order. That being said, a more radical bill, deceptively title FOCA (Freedom of Choice Act), looms for introduction and debate prior to its possible acceptance. President Obama has already conﬁrmed that he looks forward to signing the bill into law. This is serious business, and any efforts to support this bill should be discouraged in its infancy. By creating a “fundamental right” to abortion throughout the nine months of pregnancy would make abortion an “entitlement” the government must condone and promote. It would eliminate a broad range of laws: informed consent laws, parental involvement laws, laws promoting maternal health, abortion clinic regulations, government programs and facilities that pay for or promote childbirth and other health care
Concerns aired
without subsidizing abortion, conscience protection laws, laws prohibiting a particular abortion procedure (e.g., partial birth abortion), and laws requiring that abortions only be performed by a licensed physician. FOCA would deprive the American people in all 50 states of the freedom they now have to enact modest restraints and regulations on the abortion industry. Ramiﬁcations of the enactment of the bill would lead to the closing of Catholic hospitals which would not perform these procedures as a matter of faith. It would also encourage professionals “of conscience” to seek non-related occupations. All this to the detriment of the needs of society and at great expense to non-religious institutions. A more accurate title of this bill would be FFRA (Freedom from Responsibility Act or Freedom from Respect Act). Here, the bill would sanctify selﬁsh, momentary gratiﬁcation, irresponsible behavior, and no respect for life. With the current mentality in Washington, how long will it be before the government decides to reduce its Medicare expenses with at FTETAA bill, (Freedom to Euthanize the Aged Act)? This FOCA bill adversely affects society in general and all citizens should be outraged that it was even proposed. Hopefully, all our representatives will be inundated with opposition letters. George W. Shabet Ridgewood